“Mom, Dad, eat what you can quickly. Dusk and I are going to get Leaf and Thomanji'yheri. When we get back, we’ll all need to leave. Pronto.”

Walter, who was eating a piece of bread piled high with what Reeve was pretty sure was bat-milk cheese, looked up with a disappointed frown. Wanda nodded absentmindedly as she stacked a piece of something Reeve couldn’t identify at all on bread and looked around the table, at which sat several new smiling gnomes who’d appeared since Reeve and Dusk rose moments earlier and most of whom were smiling wide-eyed at Walter.

“It will be our misfortune if you leave us so soon,” Yorrin said.

Reeve made a vague gesture of gratitude and turned and walked quickly toward the infirmary. As she approached the area where they’d left Leaf and Thomanji'yheri, she found herself walking past a long row of seated gnomes, each of whom had a grotesquely large leach attached to a leg or arm.

“There is my tormentor and savior,” Thomanji'yheri said to Dusk as they approached.

Leaf gave a tired nod. “Don’t forget that she dropped both of us onto a stone floor.” Leaf appended a weak smile to her comment.

“Glad you’re both conscious and unparalyzed,” Reeve said, “and I wish we could let you rest, but we need to hoof it. Helia…” Reeve stared at the leaches decorating Thomanji'yheri’s arms and legs. “Don’t you need more blood, not less?”

“These are providing,” the frock-wearing gnome said as she arrived and began giving each leach a quick, hard squeeze, ”not taking.”

Reeve looked back at the row of tiny gnomes. “From them?”

The frocked gnome nodded.

“That works?”

“We have used this knowledge for generations,” the gnome said.

“Well, OK.” Reeve had trouble looking away from the leaches. “Can they walk?”

“If they must, but I would not advise it.”

Stolen story; please report.

“I can work with that,” Reeve said. To Leaf and Thomanji'yheri she said, “Meet us at the door we came in through, as soon as you can.” She jerked a thumb toward Dusk. “We’ll go grab my parents and our stuff.”

Neither Leaf nor Thomanji'yheri appeared pleased with the plan, but neither objected, and each slowly began to sit up.

Reeve started to turn away but stopped herself and turned back to Thomanji’yheri. “Listen, not to get off track, ‘cause I’m the one who wants to hurry anyway, but do you mind me asking what the deal is with your eyes?”

“My eyes?” Thomanji’yheri said as he worked to continue his slow rise.

“Yeah. Eyes. Peepers. I don’t know if you know this, but they’re red. All red. Nothin’ but red.”

Thomanji’yheri nodded a nod as anemic as his progress in standing. “Corallium. Red coral.”

“Your eyes are…coral?” Reeve blinked and flinched involuntarily as she imagined what it would feel like to blink eyelids if they had to slide across coral.

“When Helia found me, I’d lost both eyes.”

“Lost?”

“You ever see a mine scorpion? A full-size one?” Thomanji’yheri raised one horizontal palm to a height a foot above his head.

“No.”

“Then consider yourself in the good graces of the gods. That was the last thing I ever saw with the eyes of my birth. Once I was recovered enough, Helia gave me a fair block of red coral, and by touch I crafted replacements. Well, not exactly replacements. Helia enchanted my handiwork to allow me to see, but it is a sight of a kind far different than anything I’d seen afore.”

Reeve raised both hands, at a loss. “What? A sunset filter? Sepia?”

Thomanji’yheri swept his gaze around the room. “The world is afire.”

“The world is afire?” Reeve watched Thomanji’yheri as he scanned the room. “Is this a riddle?”

Thomanji’yheri pointed to a distance fireplace. “It blazes.”

“As fire does.”

He pointed to a jar into which the nurse was dropping leeches. “As those made of water, or ice.”

“You mean you see heat?”

“Aye.”

“Got it. Thermal vision. I’ll have to think about that. Later.” Reeve again wove back toward her parents. She found her father spreading cheese on a new piece of bread, while her mother appeared finished building her open-faced stack. The female gnome to her mother’s right was eating a small piece of bread and watching Wanda with wide, impressed eyes. Wanda cast her gaze around the table.

“Seriously?” Reeve said.

“I’m just looking for a little black pepper, Mija,” Wanda said in her low fighter’s voice.

The more I let go, Reeve thought to herself, the better I will feel. The more I let go, the better I will feel. She looked around the table and saw a thimble-sized pepper shaker sitting in front of the gnome to her mother’s right. Reeve pointed. “Shaker.”

Wanda craned her neck down in the direction Reeve was pointing. “What?”

“Shake-er,” Reeve said, feeling like she was going to scream. They could be sooooo incapable sometimes, she thought.

“I can never understand how you’re supposed to figure out something like that in one of these games,” Wanda said with a shrug, plucked the gnome sitting next to her from her chair, tilted her tiny feet high in the air, and shook her head toward the stack of food.

A silence Reeve found all too familiar fell over the cellar.